[WikiEN-l] Deleting over 45000 items

[Thomas Dalton]

> This is the kind of comment that reduces me to complete and utter
> baffled disbelief: that the extraordinary cinematic experience of a
> work like Citizen Kane can be reduced in some minds to a single,
> rather hackneyed mcguffin, which if known in advance, in some way
> "spoils" the film.
>
> We do not write a good encyclopedia by pandering to that kind of
> illiteracy (a word that used in this context is, I think, doubly
> appropriate).

The film was written in such a way as to keep the fact secret until a
particular point. If you already know the secret then you are seeing
the film in a way other than that which the writer intended. If the
film wasn't spoilt by knowing the secret early, why would the writer
have bothered to keep it secret?